AI is coming fiercely. Will the e-commerce industry be impacted next? An internal experiment recently released by Anthropic shows that AI agents can complete negotiations and transactions autonomously in a real market environment, providing the outside world with a window into the embryonic form of the "agency economy."
The experiment, called "Project Deal," was quietly released by Anthropic on Friday. The company's AI model Claude completes sales and price negotiations on behalf of employees in a closed market, involving real capital transactions. The experimental results show that Claude’s agent facilitated 186 transactions among more than 500 listed products, with a total transaction volume of more than 4,000 US dollars.
After the news was announced, eBay's stock price closed down about 4.5% that day. Market observers directly linked this decline to the release of "Project Deal", believing that the autonomous trading capabilities of AI demonstrated in this experiment pose a potential threat to traditional e-commerce platforms that rely on manual matching.
AI agents autonomously complete real transactions
According to Anthropic’s post on social platform Claude first conducted interviews with 69 employees to understand their buying and selling intentions and personalized instructions, and then independently negotiated prices.
Anthropic ran four parallel markets simultaneously to test the performance differences of different models in negotiations. The results show that model capabilities have a significant impact on transaction results - in the simulation scenario where the Opus and Haiku models competed against each other, the Opus model's negotiation results were significantly better than Haiku's. Notably, employees who participated in the survey were not aware of this gap.
Anthropic stated that this experiment aims to present the early form of AI-to-AI business interaction, and heralds the arrival of an "agency economy" in which AI robots negotiate with each other and independently seek prices.
E-commerce stocks are under pressure as market concerns spread
After the release of "Project Deal", the market's concerns about AI technology subverting the traditional e-commerce model quickly heated up. Polymarket Money posted on social media that "eBay's management is paying attention to this development" and attached relevant screenshots, which triggered widespread reposting.
eBay's stock price immediately fell by about 4.5% at the close of trading in New York that day. The impact of AI on the software industry has been reflected before, and the autonomous trading capabilities demonstrated in this experiment have caused the market to begin to re-evaluate the potential impact of AI on the business model of e-commerce platforms.
It is worth noting that Anthropic chose to quietly release this research report on Friday afternoon—when market attention was highly distracted by the U.S.-Iran situation in the past two months—but the market reaction it triggered was still swift and direct.